著者
志村 正雄
出版者
一般財団法人 日本英文学会
雑誌
英文学研究 (ISSN:00393649)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.44, no.1, pp.41-48, 1967

<p>This paper is an attempt to examine some affinity between Melville's "The Encantadas" and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. This idea in germ lies in Richard Chase's introduction to Selected Tales and Poems by Herman Melville, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1950. There, in regard to "The Encantadas," Chase says, "There is a certain Dantean quality in this picture of an enchanted Hell," and also "The Encantadas is Melville's wasteland, in which as T. S. Eliot says in his famous poem, there is rock and no water." The former view to see the story as Melville's version of the Inferno was taken up for further consideration in I. Newberry's "'The Encantadas': Melville's Inferno" (American Literature, Vol. 38, No. 1, March 1966). The latter, the idea of "The Encantadas" as Melville's The Waste Land, has not been examined so far. The paper does not propose to investigate the influence of Melville on Eliot. It does check similarities, obvious and implied, between the two, but, at the same time, tries to see them through the perspective of American literature as a whole so that one may, hopefully, find a clue to the structure of the American imagination. Similarities, indeed, abound in the two works. Both present the sterile paysage moralise where "there is rock and no water," and when there is water, there is "death by water." The reigning color in both is black, with occasional fire of red. Both are often humorous in tone, contrary to the dark subject they are dealing with. When Melville says, "Here at the summit [of Rock Rodondo] you and I stand," one can almost hear Eliot saying, "Let us go then, you and I," and this "you" is close to the "you" in "You! hypocrite lecteur!-mon semblable,-mon frere!" in The Waste Land. The dog in Eliot's ambiguous line, "Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men," is, if one follows Elizabeth Drew's interpretation, close to that found in "Sketch Seventh" and "Sketch Eighth" (an enemy to men under the Dog-King, a friend under the Chola widow). The style of each sometimes goes out of the boundary of the proper genre (prose and verse). Above all the following three points should be emphasized. First, their allusion to, or reliance on, the heritage of literature, which, typically, will be seen in their quotations and choice of names. A quotation without giving its source (a means to set up a close and closed relation between the author and the reader who identifies it) as in case of the first quotation of each work was to be skillfully used by other American writers too (Hemingway for example). The choice of names like Melville's "Sycorax" or Eliot's "Tiresias," as effective as a quotation, is a technique utilized widely from Cooper ("Ishmael Bush" in The Prairie) to Salinger ("Sybil Carpenter" in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish"). Related to this, one cannot ignore American writers' general concern with names which may go back to the Puritan psychology in the seventeenth century when "the Puritan elegist might well believe that in a man's name God had inserted evidence of his nature and his fate" (Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry, Princeton University Press, 1961, Chapt. II, "Origins: Poetry and the Puritan Imagination"). Secondly, they share the device of anticipating what comes later in the work. Eliot uses this device in the famous Tarot cards in Madame Sosotoris's hand. In Melville's case, it is to be found in the description of the creatures at Rock Rodondo. The penguin, "grotesquely misshapen," "pertaining neither to Carnival nor Lent," anticipates "Fatherless Oberlus."</p><p>(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)</p>
著者
佐藤 憲一
出版者
一般財団法人 日本英文学会
雑誌
英文学研究 支部統合号 (ISSN:18837115)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.3, pp.169-184, 2011

This paper is an attempt at rereading Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond as a political allegory. It focuses on the loss and recovery of the sight of Stephen Dudley, the father of the novel's heroine Constantia. Though overlooked by former critics, Stephen Dudley's blindness and subsequent recovery by surgical operation provokes political significance in Ormond, which up to now has been frequently referred to as simply a "Bildungsroman" of the novel's heroine Constantia. After briefly reviewing the history of treatment for cataracts, the paper first confirms Stephen's cure is clearly informed by Enlightenment medicine. Various contemporary documents show the radical cure of the blind is promoted most by the Enlightenment. The notion of radical cure was first prevailed in France and then in Britain by the promotion of scientific academies. In this process, curing the blind became one of the most important issues in the Enlightenment medicine. In view of this intellectual tradition, Ormond can be read as a novel, though partly, but clearly informed by the Enlightenment. Indeed, detailed comparison of the texts of Ormond and of contemporary reference sources on the treatment of cataracts proves that Stephen is cured through the method of extraction, which was invented and promoted by Enlightenment medicine. The next point to be observed is the problem of who operates on Stephen's cataract. The text of Ormond tells us that the doctor who treats Stephen is not a native of the United States but a traveling oculist from Europe. And contemporary advertisements in local newspapers tell us that the situation described in the novel is quite similar to the circumstances of cataract surgery in the United States around 1800. In Ormond, the traveling oculist radically extracts Stephen's 'evil' cataract. And the doctor, 'one of the numerous agents and dependants of Ormond,' is supposed to be a member of the Illuminati, a politically radical secret society that was a menace to social order in Europe and the United States. Here, a politically radical thus performs medically radical treatment. But, ironically enough, in respect of the policy of the Federalist Party, the doctor can be the very 'evil' who should be extracted from the body politic of the United States. Considering the fact that Federalists enforced the notorious Alien Acts to deport 'evil' foreigners such as the Illuminati out of the nation, we can safely say the performance of the traveling oculist is self-contradictory. He is at once a subject involved in extraction in a surgical operation and is an object of extraction by Federalist politics. In this sense, his performance accuses the Federalist policy of setting xenophobic laws in the nation framed mainly and invariably by immigration. Thus the pro-Federalist performance by the Illuminati doctor reveals the emptiness of the laws and their meaninglessness in setting binary opposition between inside/outside, foreign/native, good/evil at the first stage of nation-building. In this sense the performance of the doctor has the potential to be a counter-discourse against the Federalists by deconstructing their xenophobic policy. The cataract that invades Stephen's eye and makes him unable to see is a metaphor for the early Republic susceptible to 'internal invasion,' and his cure is a Federalist way of dealing with the matter. Performing the invasion and the treatment on it at once, the traveling oculist in Ormond illuminates the limit of the Federalist politics of the day. In short, he claims there can be no Americans without aliens. Detailed consideration of Stephen's cataract operation thus opens the possibility of reading Ormond as a political allegory.
著者
阪田 勝三
出版者
一般財団法人 日本英文学会
雑誌
英文学研究 (ISSN:00393649)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.45, no.1, pp.39-48, 1968

<p>The Janus-like imagination of Keats seems to show a kind of dilemma of romanticism itself, for, more than any others, romantic artists almost deify their personal imagination as universal truth. Though Keats affirmed the truth of imagination as strong as other romantic poets, he was, on the other hand, so much afraid of "sickly imagination", the arbitrariness of imagination, that he always tried to judge his inner vision by opposing objective reality. The Janus-faced attitude was inevitable for him as imagination's stepping toward truth. Poetry for Keats, therefore, may be said to be the relation between two contrasting images. When these two images were fused into one, his personal imagination would be identified with universal reality. Though he knew well that "it is impossible to prove that black is white," he never stopped his imagination flying, though promised failure, for this impossible aim. "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever" was the deepest, immutable longing through his life. It was not because of his dreaming Elysium, but of his actual feeling of life's brevity. His longing for the eternal joy never means his escape from time and reality, but, on the contrary, it shows that he was confronted with the fugitiveness and uncertainty of life. The relation between two contrasting images is, in this regard, the relation between time and eternity. The nightingale, which is called "immortal bird" in the Ode, is, seen objectively, nothing but a helpless bird no less than human beings. This transformation from a mortal bird to an immortal one, from a bird within time to the one beyond time, is the essence of his vision and the heart-ache and pain of the beginning symbolize the violent struggle of time with eternity, like Lamia's brilliant anguish in her transfiguration from a serpent to a fair lady. In the nightingale's earthly paradise, "embalmed darkness," he feels the eternal joy of the nightingale as his own and is "half in love with easeful Death." From his earlier poems Keats has been interested in the Eternal Present of the natural scenes, as Perkins ingeniously researched in The Quest for Permanence. But the very fact that Eternal Present prevails in his poetry indicates that beauty and joy was always ephemeral for him. But in the pastoral scenes it does not stir the tragic sense of life. With his bitter recognition of "an eternal fierce destruction" dominant in the world, his innocent joy in the Eternal Present was mercilessly destroyed and he had to seek desperately for the eternal joy by his imagination. He was convinced that Negative Capability and "intensity" were the ways to unite imagination with truth, time with eternity. In the Pleasure Thermometer passage of Endymion the chief intensity, the crown, of "enthralments far more self-destroying" is made of love and friendship. Love and imagination are the same for Keats, or at least two different aspects of the same thing. In this famous passage Keats mentions the nightingale's "passionate breath" as an example of earthly love's magical power, "making men's being mortal, immortal". As in the love letter of Hawthorne, the nightingale's affection (and in Keats imagination, too) "diffuses round us eternity". "Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem of imagination making us "feel that we live above time and apart from time". But this feeling of happiness was too short-lived as it was in almost all the poems of later years, for Death, one of two luxuries to brood over for him beside his sweet-heart's Loveliness, was realized in a moment to be "nothing" worse than those pains of life. The longing for eternity in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is not a vain dreaming like "one eternal pant" in "To J.R.", nor an</p><p>(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)</p>
著者
川崎 寿彦
出版者
一般財団法人 日本英文学会
雑誌
英文学研究 (ISSN:00393649)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.43, no.1, pp.57-71, 1966

17世紀の形而上詩の本質を把握するためには、いわゆるBen's TribeとDonne's Schoolとの区別がたてられねばならず、そのためにはBen JonsonとJohn Donneの対照が明確でなければならない。本稿は詩的比喩に対する両者の態度を考察するが、とくに当時(16世紀末から17世紀初頭)の英国で、やや時期はずれの復活を見せていた錬金術というものに対して、二人が対照的な態度をとったという事実を足がかりにして、問題の核心に迫ろうとこころみるものである。